


Five Things Richie Forgot and One he Didn't

by IAmTheUnsub



Category: IT (Movies - Muschietti), IT - Stephen King
Genre: 5+1 Things, F/M, Gen, M/M, Memory Alteration, Richie Tozier Loves Eddie Kaspbrak
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-03
Updated: 2019-10-03
Packaged: 2020-11-22 20:56:16
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,652
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20880557
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/IAmTheUnsub/pseuds/IAmTheUnsub
Summary: Five things Richie forgot once he left Derry and one thing he could never.





	Five Things Richie Forgot and One he Didn't

**Author's Note:**

> I'm back on my bullshit and sad about Reddie. Come at me.

1

Richie carried an inhaler.  
He had carried an inhaler for as long as he could remember. It wouldn’t be so weird if Richie had asthma, but he didn’t. So the inhaler couldn’t be his. It was an old one too, cracked blue plastic with a peeling prescription label attached, yellowed from time and so badly faded that Richie couldn’t make out the name. No matter how hard he tried, Richie could never remember who the inhaler belonged to. He couldn’t even remember where he’d gotten it, his doctor had no record of him ever being prescribed an inhaler, and Richie didn’t think he was fucked up enough to steal someone else’s. There was something weirdly comforting about its presence. He slept with it on his bedside table every night and it had become a habit to slip it into the pocket of whatever jacket he was wearing. He had tried to leave it at home so many times, but a creeping feeling of wrongness would sneak up his spine before he’d even left his apartment. He would panic and turn around, curling up on his bed with the inhaler clutched between his fists until he calmed down. He managed to make it out onto the street without it once, only to scramble back into his building to retrieve it when he heard someone on the street cough. He would catch himself reaching for the inhaler when he was stressed, just brushing his fingers against the plastic for a second. He couldn’t get through a stand-up routine without having the inhaler on him. Every performer had superstitions, but Richie had never met anyone else who had to take a puff from a decades old inhaler before walking onstage. 

2

Richie knew he had parents.  
Of course he had parents, everyone did. He didn’t just appear in a puff of smoke on a New York City street at age eighteen. He just…couldn’t remember their faces. Or voices. Or what they were like. He didn’t even realise it wasn’t normal until some of his college classmates started reminiscing about what they missed from home. Richie had no memory of ever being read a bedtime story, of hearing his mother’s voice sing him a lullaby, of his dad teaching him to ride a bike or play catch. It was terrifying for Richie to realise that he could probably walk right by his parents on the street and not recognise them. He knew he had called home a few times during his first few months of college, but he’d forget his parent’s voices and what they had talked about almost as soon as they hung up. He got a birthday card from them every year, just a bland, generic card with “Happy Birthday, love from Mom and Dad” scrawled inside. He never visited home, he spent Christmas and Thanksgiving holed up in his dorm room with half-thawed TV dinners. He wasn’t sure why. He just knew that every time he thought about booking flights home he would be overcome with panic. But his parents never came to New York either. So Richie forgot about his parents, sent them Christmas cards because he also couldn’t remember their birthdays, and moved on with his life. 

3

Richie hated boybands.  
At least, that’s what he would tell you if you asked him. He was a man’s man, way too masculine to listen to boybands. He’d boo and heckle loudly whenever and one played NSYNC or the Backstreet Boys on a jukebox, announcing that he was going for a smoke until it was “safe to come back inside”. There was only one exception to Richie’s hatred.  
Richie loved New Kids on the Block  
He had a box full of mixtapes under his bed, all labelled with the names of rock bands. But when Richie was alone he would reach in and pull out the one labelled ‘Enter Sandman’ and throw it into his boom-box. The New Kids upbeat, poppy voices would ring out through his apartment while he washed dishes, wrote new jokes, did his taxes. You name it. When Richie was alone, he was listening to the New Kids. He could probably recite every lyric backwards of he was asked to. He wasn’t sure why he was so attached to this one specific band. He just found their music comforting. He always felt more relaxed, less anxious when he listened to the New Kids. It felt like being surrounded by friends, a feeling Richie was oddly familiar with, despite never having had a close circle of friends as far as he could remember. 

4  
Richie hated camping.  
He hated feeling cold and wet and getting lost because every fucking tree looks exactly the same. Richie couldn’t help but be paranoid every time he entered the woods, afraid he’d go missing and never come out again. He’d seen the Blair Witch Project and he was mildly scarred from it. But Richie, like the idiot he was, had gotten into a relationship with an outdoorsy type and had pretended to love camping to impress her. So there he was, in the middle of nowhere, laying on the forest floor beside Lana, who he’d had to talk out of climbing a fucking mountain.  
“Cloud watching is so romantic, babe!”, Richie had pled, trying to pretend he didn’t just want to lay down.  
Richie should stick to his own type and find himself a girlfriend who liked Netflix and pizza, not one who had a survival kit and went base jumping, though seeing her extensive hoard of first aid supplies always left him feeling warm and content for some reason.  
“Oh Richie look! Look at that sweet little bird!”, Lana cooed, pointing at a small bird fluttering around a patch of flowers close by. Richie raised his head up to look.  
“Archilochus colubris”, he commented mildly. Lana sat up and looked at him, puzzled.  
“What?”, she asked.  
“The bird, it’s an archilochus colubris. A ruby-throated hummingbird”, he elaborated. Lana looked mildly impressed.  
“How do you know that? You’ve never mentioned that you like birds?”  
Richie sits up, but doesn’t take his eyes off the bird, confused now.  
“I’m not… I don’t like birds.”, he muttered, eyebrows furrowed. Lana raises an eyebrow.  
“So where did you learn about that one?”  
“I… I don’t remember.” Lana smiles indulgently at him, then lays her head down in his lap and drops the subject. 

5  
Richie ran his mouth and he knew it.  
He told crude jokes that made some uncomfortable and others crack up. He didn’t know when to let a bit die, so sometimes he’d do a whole set on what was supposed to be an opening joke. But people still paid to come watch him run his mouth, so he kept going. He wasn’t sure when he became popular. He couldn’t pinpoint the exact moment. It was more of a slow ascension from open mike nights, to cafes, to paid gigs in bars to opening for other people to selling out theatres with his name on the sign out front. It hadn’t been his plan, Richie had gone to college to study music production, but he would find himself at the centre of a little circle of laughter every time he told a story at a party and things had just spiralled from there. The parties had gotten better over time, just like the gigs and the pay.  
The cocktail parties his agent insisted he attend weren’t Richie’s favourite scene, his suit was too tight and the hors d'oeuvres were too small but the alcohol was free and, as per usual, he had a circle of adoring fans around him, laughing at his ramblings.  
“So, I tell her, if you wanted me to buy you a drink than all you had to do was ask! You don’t have to-”  
“Excuse me, coming through! Beep beep!”, a waitress with a tray of champagne nudges through the crowd. Richie immediately falls silent, suddenly bashful, and takes a sip of his drink. His hangers-on wait for him to continue, but he stays silent.  
“Mr Tozier?”, one of them prompts. Richie looks up to him and smiles, “Why did you stop?”  
Richie’s face drops into a puzzled expression. He blinks slowly, then puts his drink down.  
“I… I’m not sure. Do you want me to keep going?”, he asks. The group all enthusiastically agree and he launches back into his story. 

+1  
Richie remembered Eddie.  
Well, not really. Not completely. He couldn’t tell you what he looked like or what they used to do when they hung out as kids. It was the little things really. His hand dropping to his ever-present inhaler when he heard someone cough, the warm fuzzies first aid equipment gave him, the fond smile that found its way onto his face when he saw someone wearing a fanny pack, the pages of absentminded ‘R+E’s surrounded by little hearts he would doodle all over his notes in college. No, Richie might have forgotten Eddie as a person, but he never forgot the way he made Richie feel. He would hold hands with Lana and feel like something was missing, seeing visions on thighs brushing in a hammock and butterflies would explode in his stomach. He would tell a cheesy ‘your mom’ joke and revel in the laughter of his audience, but feel like there was a reaction he was missing. He would pick out an outrageous shirt for a performance and wait for his stylist to reprimand him, but she always just hummed and told him they could “make it work”.  
When Richie saw Eddie again, the missing piece clicked back into place. His jokes got groans instead of laughter, Eddie insulted his clothes before they’d even finished dinner. When Richie reached across the table to playfully shove Eddie and the butterflies burst back to life, he knew he’d never really forgotten.


End file.
